


A Small Room of Their Own

by InsominiacArrest



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Black Romance, Dark, F/F, Tension, canonverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 12:37:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4787510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsominiacArrest/pseuds/InsominiacArrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two dysfunctional Homeworld gems end up living with the Crystal Gems and try to find some solace from their restless problems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Small Room of Their Own

**Author's Note:**

> A result of me trying out a new writing style (called Metaphors and My Immortal) and trying to fill the prompt 'angst'
> 
> warning: violence, cursing, talking about death, some disturbing imagery for some

She moved like a crooked river that flowed in all the wrong directions. Stilted, tall and bending like a lightning bolt caught in slow motion, caught between fevered insults and assorted pleas.

They had her share a room with Lapis.

It was small, and pointless. Peridot didn’t sleep, and Lapis only liked to sleep near Steven.

Lapis grew bored, bored and tired and unable to drift off. She didn’t need to sleep, but she had taken it up. She watched Peridot instead.

A flashlight bug in a bottle, glowing eyes and silent resentment. Lapis didn’t understand her, why she didn’t just uncork herself from the wound up coils, let go of the constant shifting eyes and biting looks.

Lapis turned over in the bed they provided her. Steven picked out the sheets, blue on blue with the night sky plastered on every level.

She thinks she hates it, she doesn’t say that. She's hated a lot of things since she's came back.

She stares at Peridot, she glances back at her, it is a very small room, they both look away slowly, simultaneously. She was like a drizzle of rain that never cleared and Lapis lay in it, absorbed it.

She had arrived with fried circuits and a scrambled head, babbling, flustered, laid low and with nowhere else to turn.

Steven told her she wasn’t a prisoner. Garnet reassured she was.

She cursed and held herself like a shelf on someone’s bookcase, heavy and unreachable.

The second day she wandered around the house like an uncomfortable cat. Fluffed fur and endless yowls, murmuring to herself like a spell she was casting under her breath. 

She paced until Lapis lost it on her, letting loose a string of curse words and other tumbling metaphors pent up from a void of blocked doors. Lapis had taken up cursing.

Peridot had spit back and they circled each other like carnivores that smelled blood. They were Homeworld gems afterall. Garnet spoke low and steady to them, slapped Peridot, chided Lapis and Peridot cowered and then slunk back to their room.

By the third day she had stopped talking. Held herself like she swallowed a glass bottle and couldn’t let it break by opening her mouth. She didn’t look at anyone and Lapis didn’t blame her.

On the fourth day, Lapis apologized. Told her she was unstable and going through the fog of a very long storm, normally Lapis would let Peridot rot but Steven had asked her to.

She trailed every single word with a knife point flash of eyes and waited. Peridot said she didn’t care and turned her back on her.

Lapis watched her, studied her, it had been long enough to forget the event, to acclimate to normalcy.

She didn’t understand her, and yet like a whirlpool that dragged her down, she wanted to know what the crooked disaster had inside her chest that hung like a brass door.

It was the seventh day, Peridot perched on the window seat and didn't move, Lapis gave her a final look and then turned to face the wall and fell asleep. Even with Steven gone.

\--------------

Lapis was unnerving, her eyes were wide, searching, and terrible. She wanted to plunge her fingers into them and watch her recede back into her gem.

Crawl away from these terrible cravings.

The Crystal Clods didn’t let Peridot out. And Lapis didn’t go outside, despite the fact they said she was one of them.

But she was not one of them. Even she could tell that, she was a floating tower of doom, a lovely image of a bubbling poison, they all walked around her on eggshells and careful soft gloves for Lapis’s rotten sand paper-rough heart. It was bullshit.

It was bullshit and Peridot couldn’t leave, and Lapis refused to.

They shared a very small space, and their heartbeats chased each other like echoes in a cave that fell too deep and cracked too much.

At least Peridot understood that. Her.

Lapis seemed to take up eating eggs, only fried eggs and only when in their room where no one was around.

She let plates stack up by her bedside like a china palace to rest above her head while she slept, a disgusting display of human custom onto itself. And she slept a lot.

On the eighth day Peridot broke every single one of those plates. One at a time against the nearest wall and over Lapis’s star sprinkled bed. Confetti and shrapnel with thick popping joints like bones shattering.

The Crystal Gems were gone, but Lapis rushed into the room, their eyes met and it felt like frozen spacecraft rides and the feeling right before a drop.

It was angelic. Lapis poured her heart into a sang, “fuck you, shit, _twat_ , what’s wrong with you? You junk of fucking circuitry.”

It was music, the bubbling pot of poison spilling over, and Peridot being witness to a breakage.

“You should learn to clean up.” She says and breaks the final plate like a careless ivory present to the ground.

A punch to the solar plexus follows and the push over a chair, they crack walls like spitting images of veins reaching out to the houses arteries.

No one ever told her life outside of Homeworld wasn’t black and tattered.

Lapis takes one of her fingers and breaks it. Peridot pulls her hair, they rush each other and scramble, body over body, wrapped into other like intersecting snakes, crowned with rapid breathing and pores wet with sweat.

They claw and curse until they’re tired and break apart as if they are softly falling linens, tired and understanding each other.

“This is pointless.” Lapis breaths heavily. They stare at their ceiling, now fractured and fragile. Peridot doesn’t answer her.

Lapis did not report to the Crystal Gems about the plates. They don’t talk and only a whisper of tension spread between them preserves the memory of the event.

Lapis changes only in the fact she starts making Peridot weird things. Art of car engines sputtering motor oil, eggs shaped like cracked gems for her to eat (she never does), and triangle hats that read ‘dunce.’

It was so bizarre Peridot began to send her things back, long ranting letters describing how much Lapis was out of her mind, and computer programs that’s whole purpose was to call her names when she opened any files.

Lapis played the computer program on repeat like the gospel, Peridot hung the art on top of the cracks in the wall they made. They communicated in quick glares and sharp touches when no one else is looking.

Peridot swore she had lost all feelings, but something was definitely trembling within her like a taught guitar string bent and ready to cry out.

Lapis’s bright blue eyes haunted her, trailed her, ate her up and made her feel small.

\-----------

Peridot was still a puzzle where she should be simple. A dry dusty bureaucrat painted in dim green and colorless yellow. Drained of any remarkable harbors of interest.

But, when the mood hit her, she yelped and scurried and told the world her feelings in sharp vibrant bleeding red.

When the mood struck her, by day 17, she was calling them all clods again.

She was a banshee, and Steven still wanted to be ‘friends.’ Lapis rolled her eyes.

She watches her unwind and wind up, a wall of words and electric garden, thorns and all. She can’t help but follow her, wait, and trail on her footsteps.

She felt a little less afraid to make herself heard around her, a little less shaking at the fingertips and more mutual stress, and relief around one another.

Neither of them belonged to Rose Quartz, neither was chosen by a messiah or given any purpose outside of existing.

She follows her to a closet on the 19th night. She lingers outside of it, Steven was gone either with Connie, fighting, or disappeared, she didn’t know. She leans on the back of the wooden wall, rigid and solid, she shivers against it.

Peridot whimpers somewhere within, she can hear it through the heart of the house. A long cry, given to sniffling and heartbreak.

She thinks, she wonders, she stands tall and opens the door.

Peridot was crying, wet hot tears and she caught her, she caught her unwound like string pulled free from a ball of yarren.

Clear blue droplets peppered her cheeks and poignant scent of tightening lungs, short rasping breaths filled the air.

Lapis doesn’t ask what’s wrong, she knows what’s wrong.

“Hi.” She greets her like she’s disarming a grenade with her tongue.

“Come to watch me suffer.” It was a statement.

“No.” She didn’t know how to talk, it was sand in her mouth and God knows what else. “Get up.”

“I want to go home.” She stands up, she doesn’t wipe her tear stained eyes, “they’re going to kill me.”

Lapis tilted her head, so that’s what she thought.

“They won’t.”

“They will. Or else, if they don't, they’re too, too,” she struggles, Lapis reaches to touch her, hold the cringing confusion in her hands like a dagger to the existence of the Crystal Gems.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, or you do, who cares, Lazuli I don’t know why I would possibly be here.”

Lapis shrugs, “you’ll drive yourself crazy asking questions like that.”

“Smug asshole.” She bites.

Lapis plasters a white slash mark of a smile on her face.

“They make us seem dirty. Because we are.” Her words are slow and elongated, “we steal oceans and try to kill people. Crack Gems. Swallow this whole world up and then not care.”

“And then I’m supposed to feel bad.”

“You were crying.” She points out lightly. Peridot clenches her fists.

“I hate you.” Her voice is quite and trembles like thunder.

Lapis laughs, hollow like promises out of liars mouths and like wood from a gutted tree, “you know what they say though, I’m just a mirror.”  
  
Lapis thinks she’s going to hit her again, a punt of tasteless pain across her chest to her free shaking ribcage. She feels lips. That was just as good.

Hard and humorless fingers press her up against the wall, trail up and down her thighs, pushing her skirt up.

Her mouth is just as uneven as she is, surgical and precise on top of Lapis’s, it tastes like salt and something bitter.

Lapis kisses back, hoping to bruise her mouth like a current against a stone.

She pushes her, digging glistening nails into her shoulders until Peridot growls and pins her arms above her head.

Her floating fingers crush her wrists to the wall, pinning her down and feeling like hand cuffs.

Like chains. This time it is Lapis with wet hot fluid leaking out of her wide awake eyes, remembering, cold all over her body except her stinging lips.

Peridot licks the tears off her cheeks, unsympathetically, unmitigated. Lapis finds herself in love. Not with the girl, but with a rough tongue that isn’t telling her she’ll be okay.

She wasn’t okay, and she let herself be held down.

Peridot’s other fingers trail up past her skirt, revealing her legs, and her underwear and making their way to inside of her.

She is gasping and biting her when the warp pad sounds.

They break apart like a tree struck by lightning, split at the trunk.

They topple to the ground, Lapis rubs her wrists and Peridot smears the spit off her mouth. They scramble to sit up as the gems look over to them,

“You two aren’t fighting again?” Steven asks, concerned, heart felt.

“No.” Lapis says quickly.

“I was just going to my room.” Peridot says quickly in her usual shrill tone.

“Well, alright,” Steven says slowly, “but we’ll be out here playing board games if you want to join us!” He calls after her as she disappears.

Lapis feigns a smile. She wants to play, she really does.

She also just wants to collect dirty plates, scream every swear she knows, and kiss Peridot the homeworld gem until she crashes to the ground and self-combusts.

She feigns a smile and makes up an excuse to go back to their room. And she sits back down on her bed and they stare at each other from across the shallow space.

  
It’s still hard to talk, sand and cotton balls clog her mouth and she doesn’t know what to say. Peridot curls up on herself and looks outside, probably thinking about her own execution.

Lapis turns around and stares at the ceiling, thinking about the bottom of the ocean and a thousand feet of water on her lungs.

She glances at Peridot, then flips onto to her side to face the wall and falls asleep.


End file.
